![handle is hein.journals/ctlcrm29 and id is 1 raw text is: Critical Criminology (2021) 29:1-2
https://doi.org/1 0.1007/si 0612-021-09555-3
Editor's Introduction to Volume 29
Avi Brisman'23
Published online: 10 February 2021
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. part of Springer Nature 2021
When I took physics in high school, our teacher offered us US$1 for every error we found
in the textbook. She had written the book and I delighted in the challenge. The goal had
been for us to read closely enough to identify scientific miscalculations. I was not a very
good physics student. But I was editor-in-chief of our high school newspaper. I found
countless mistakes in the textbook's grammar, punctuation and style, and I reveled in pre-
senting my findings to my teacher.
On the plus side, I made enough money to buy gas for my 1979 Oldsmobile Cutlass
Cruiser station wagon. With its V8 engine, the station wagon was a gas guzzler. But gas
was cheap then (about US$1.13 or $1.14/gallon).
On the downside, I did not really learn much physics. So, when reading Nick Mamatas's
The Planetbreaker's Son (2021:39), while in isolation after testing positive for COVID-19,
I could not ascertain whether the following statement contained more science than fiction:
A mirror is a method of time travel, or at least transtemporal perception. ... [L]ight
takes time to travel and human minds take time to interpret the information their eyes
collect. A reflect is always a bit of old news, if only by the billionth of a second. If
one could build a mirror the size of a planet and plop it a light year from one's loca-
tion, then peer into it with the aid of a sufficiently powerful telescope, one would see
in the mirror-planet's reflection a scene from two years prior.
What I can say, though, is that if we were to conduct such an experiment, the image of the
world would be most perverse. Or so I hope we would look at it that way. So, I hope that
what we experience two years from now makes early 2021 seem obscene.
Consider Wednesday, January 13, 2021. Donald J. Trump became the first American
president to be impeached twice (Fandos 2021), while former Michigan Governor Rick
Snyder was charged for his role in the Flint water crisis-the environmental disaster that
contaminated the city's drinking water, resulting in the deaths of at least a dozen peo-
ple (Booker 2021). Well, maybe what is obscene is that Trump got to stick around long
E Avi Brisman
avi.brisman@newcastle.edu.au; avi.brisman@eku.edu
School of Justice Studies, College of Justice and Safety, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond,
KY, USA
2 School of Justice, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD,
Australia
3 Newcastle Law School, Faculty of Business and Law, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW,
Australia
Springer](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/ctlcrm29&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
What Is HeinOnline?
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most